Essay on Black Hole

Essay on black hole

Black holes are one of the strangest things in existence. They don't seem to make any sense. Where do they come from and what happens if you fall into one?

Stars are incredibly vast collections of mostly hydrogen atoms that have fallen from giant gas clouds under their own gravity. At their core, nuclear fusion crushes hydrogen atoms into helium releasing enormous amounts of energy.

This energy, in the form of radiation, pushes against gravity, creating a delicate balance between the two forces.

As long as there is fusion in the core, a star is sufficiently stable. But for stars with a greater mass than our own Sun, the heat and pressure at the core allow them to fuse heavier elements until they reach iron. Unlike all earlier elements, the fusion process that creates iron does not generate any energy.

Iron builds up in the centre of the star until it reaches a critical volume and the balance between radiation and gravity is suddenly broken.

The core collapses. Within a fraction of a second, the star explodes. Moving at about a quarter of the speed of light, feed even more mass into the core.

It is at this very moment that all the heavy elements in the universe are created as soon as the star dies in a supernova explosion.

It either forms a neutron star or, if the star is massive enough, the entire mass of the core collapses into a black hole.

If you look at a black hole, what you are actually seeing is the event horizon. Anything that crosses the event horizon needs to travel faster than the speed of light to escape. In other words, it is impossible.

So we just see a black area indicating nothing. But if the event horizon is the black part, what is the "hole" part of the black hole? Singularity. We're not sure what it really is.

A singularity can be indefinitely dense, meaning that all of its mass is concentrated at a single point in space, with no surface or volume, or something completely isolated. Right now, we don't know. It's like a "divide by zero" error.

By the way, black holes don't suck up things like a vacuum cleaner, if we swap out the Sun for an equally large black hole, nothing will change for Earth except we'll freeze to death.

 What would happen to you if you fell into a black hole?

The experience of time around a black hole is different, from the outside you start to slow down as you get closer to the event horizon, so time passes slower for you. At some point, you start to freeze over time, gradually turn red, and disappear.

From your point of view, you can see the rest of the universe fast forward, as if looking into the future. Right now, we don't know what happens next, but we think it could be one of two things:

One, you die early. A black hole twists space so much that once you cross the event horizon, only one direction is possible. You can take it - literally - inside the event horizon, you can only go in one direction.

It's really like being in a narrow alley that closes behind you after every step. The mass of a black hole is so concentrated that, at some point, even a short distance of a few centimetres will mean that gravity acts on different parts of your body with a force millions of times greater.

Your cells explode as your body stretches more and more until you become a hot stream of plasma, one atom wide.

Two, you die too soon. Soon after crossing the event horizon, you'll hit a firewall and be finished in an instant.

Neither of these options is particularly pleasant. How soon you will die depends on the mass of the black hole. A small black hole will kill you before it even enters its event horizon, whereas you can probably travel inside a massive black hole for quite some time.

As a rule, the further away you are from the singularity, the longer you'll live. Black holes come in different sizes. There are stellar-mass black holes, which have a mass of a few times the mass of the Sun and the diameter of an asteroid. And then there are the supermassive black holes, which are found at the centre of every galaxy, and have been feeding for billions of years.

Currently, the largest known supermassive black hole is S5 0014+81. 40 billion times the mass of our Sun. Its diameter is 236.7 billion kilometres, which is 47 times the distance of Pluto from the Sun.

As powerful as black holes are, they will eventually evaporate through a process called Hawking radiation. To understand how it works, we have to look at empty space.

The empty space is not really empty but filled with virtual particles that are coming into existence and annihilating each other again. When it is right on the edge of the black hole, one of the virtual particles will be pulled into the black hole, and the other will escape and become a real particle.

So the black hole is losing energy. This happens incredibly slowly at first and gets faster as the black hole gets smaller. When it comes to the mass of a large asteroid, it is radiating at room temperature.

When it has the same mass as that of a mountain, it radiates with almost the heat of our Sun. And in the last seconds of its life, the black hole radiates with the energy of billions of atomic bombs in a massive explosion.

But this process is incredibly slow, we know that it can take a googol year for the largest black hole to vanish. It's so long that when the last black hole radiates, no one will be around to see it. The universe would have been uninhabited long ago since then.

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